Microsoft has released its own FreeBSD distribution and offered official support to Azure users. The kernel level changes/investments made by Redmond will be up-streamed into the official FreeBSD 10.3 release. Justin T. Gibbs, the FreeBSD Foundation’s President, called its an important milestone for the community.

This doesn’t mean that it will ever be published, released as open source, and out in the wild, but it does mean that they Microsoft is even more so willing to invest in the *nix world. Microsoft has picked a BSD licensed Unix-like operating system for the same reason Apple used a BSD operating system, they can sell it and not make it open source. Microsoft and Apple are, and will continue to, reap the benefit of the open source community doing development, and they can just sell their version.

And, just in case anyone thinks they aren’t serious about this, they just released PowerShell, available to run on Linux and MacOS (and probably very easily ported to another BSD-like FreeBSD).

Microsoft wants to earn customers’ preference as the platform for running all their workloads – Linux as well as Windows. This new thinking empowered the .NET team to port .NET Core to Linux and that in turn, enabled PowerShell to port to Linux as well. PowerShell on Linux is now designed to enable customers to use the same tools, and the same people, to manage everything from anywhere. It is initially available on Ubuntu, Centos, as well as Red Hat, and also runs on Mac OS X. More platforms will be added in the future. You can download Alpha builds and check out the source code from GitHub.

I live in a new world, and if Microsoft continues down this path, we might be running “Windows” on a BSD kernel.